The Stack

Let’s take a moment to examine how the monsters of DROD were adapted for DROD RPG. The main thing that distinguishes the monsters from each other in the original game is how they move: roaches and tar babies charge straight at you, roach queens flee, evil eyes stay still until you cross their line of sight, goblins try to avoid your sword and attack you from behind, rock golems tend to get stuck on obstacles that other monsters are smart enough to go around, and so forth. Well, in DROD RPG, monsters don’t move. They just stand there blocking passageways until you decide to fight them. So, that’s a whole lot of distinguishing characteristics scrapped. As a result, most of the monsters are pretty much the same thing with different stats.

Mind you, that’s something that a game of this sort really needs. Like most RPGs, it’s all about the steady escalation of power. The game weirdly abstracts away some of the escalation effect by simply giving each level a multiplier that affects all potions and power-ups on that level, but I suppose applying it to monsters stats as well would be more honesty than the genre could bear. At any rate, the developers seem to have needed more gradations of monster stat than easily fit onto the set of original DROD monsters, and have crammed in some extras, repurposing some of Beethro’s puzzle-solving tools such as the fegundo and the decoy as monsters, as well as making up more powerful versions of existing monsters. It all reminds me a little of Star Wars-based games such as Dark Forces that have you fight things like the the Interrogation Droid and the Imperial Probot that appeared in the films in brief non-combatant roles.

There is still some variation of behavior, though. Some monsters, such as the evil eye, take a swing at you automatically when you pass right in front of them. People with swords get an extra attack in at the beginning of combat if you have to go through the sword to get at them, as is sometimes the case. Of all the creatures I’ve seen, the one that comes closest to its original form is the Aumtlich, which still has its deadly screen-crossing eyebeams. They don’t have the same effect at they did on Beethro — instead of freezing you in place, walking through the beam drains half your hit points, which is yet another example of stats substituting for movement. But at least it’s using the room geometry, and there are some puzzles made from it.

The creatures called “brains” are another notable special case. As in the original, they’re not powerful combatants themselves, but they make all the other monsters in the room more formidable. Again, stats take the place of movement: where the DROD brains gave the monsters access to a pathing algorithm, the DROD RPG ones double their attack strength.

Then there’s wubbas. Wubbas are essentially giant fluffly marshmallows, impossible to destroy with a sword. They’re harmless, but only in the sense that they can’t damage you. In Journey to Rooted Hold, where they first showed up, they often thronged around Beethro until he couldn’t move and had to start the room over. I’ve only seen one wubba so far in DROD RPG, where it was standing guard over a semi-secret hallway. The interesting thing is that its invulnerability wasn’t a special property: instead, it simply had a very high defense stat. In theory, you could kill it with a sword if you found enough power-ups, although I don’t think enough exist in Chapter 1. Still, there just might be a way past it by using special items. In fact, I’d have enough attack power to get by it if I only had the Slayer’s hook that I can see tantalizingly discarded in an inaccessible part of one room. I’ll talk about that more in my next post.

Last September, a game came out that I didn’t have time for at the time, but greatly wanted to try: DROD RPG: Tendry’s Tale, a work in the DROD setting, with familiar creatures and a plot linked to DROD: The City Beneath. The change in game mechanics is reflected by a change in protagonist: instead of Beethro, we have Tendry, a Stalwart of Tueno. In TCB, the Stalwarts charged en masse to their slaughter at the hands of the Empire, leaving only a few scattered survivors to assist Beethro with occasional puzzles. Tendry is one of those survivors.

It’s always interesting to see how a game franchise weathers the translation from one genre to another, especially if the genres are greatly different. And the source material here is far from RPG-like: DROD is a puzzle game, entirely deterministic, with a combat model in which everything, including the player, has one hit point and no defense: whoever manages to strike first immediately wins. DROD RPG preserves a lot of the DROD feel simply by using the same graphics (scaled up a bit), but throws away most of the tactical puzzle-solving in favor of stat-based toe-to-toe monster-bashing.

This doesn’t mean it plays like a typical RPG. The designers have chosen to keep the determinism of the original DROD and do without any random factors in combat. Instead, you just automatically take turns trading blows with the monsters, and each blow does damage equal to the attacker’s Attack rating reduced by the defender’s Defense rating, until one of you is dead. Just by examining a monster’s stats, you can tell in advance how many hit points you’ll lose by engaging it. In fact, the game spares you the trouble of doing the math yourself and just includes the battle outcome (given your current stats) in the monster’s right-click tooltip — a sterling example of the “conveniences are nice” principle.

This extreme simplification at the tactical level means that the game is mainly played at the strategic level, where it becomes one huge resource-management puzzle. For example, sometimes you have two possible routes to a place you want to get to, one blocked by a monster, one blocked by a gate that can be unlocked with a key. (This is the lockpick-that-breaks-off-in-the-lock sort of key: they’re not specific to a single gate, but they’re consumed on use.) Either route involves some kind of expenditure of a resource, those resources being keys or hit points. You might be able to reduce or even eliminate the hit point cost, though, by finding powerups or equipment elsewhere, although you’re certainly going to pay some sort of price for such a gain. Basically, it pays to be circumspect and not rush into battles until you know what your options are.

The irony is that this is exactly the opposite of how Tendry claims to act. The Stalwarts put great stock in the courage — the level titles in the game are derived from the “rules” that the Stalwarts live by, and all the rules seem to be synonyms (“bravery”, “valor”, etc.) The occasional narration we get from our hero is full of comments about how a Stalwart always leaps feet-first into danger and recks not the cost and so forth. This is, of course, how the Stalwarts got themselves killed. I haven’t gotten very far into the game yet, but I’ve seen enough flashbacks to know that Tendry is a reluctant Stalwart, a would-be writer who was pushed into the army by his father. It’s entirely possible that he survived the massacre by being cowardly by Stalwart standards and acting like he does under player control. Or maybe not. Beethro himself is a big ugly guy who uses a Really Big Sword to solve all his problems, and was made the hero of a thinking game. So perhaps Tendry is just intended as a similar mismatch between apparent character and gameplay.

Let’s talk about Blue Magic for a moment. Blue magic isn’t really all that important to the Final Fantasy series; it’s more or less a sideline for completists. All the really important magical effects — direct damage, healing, buffs and debuffs — are pretty much covered by normal spells. So what does that leave for the Blue Mage to discover?

One of the things it leaves is quirky effects that don’t play by the normal rules. Things like the “1000 Needles” spell (aka “Blowfish”), which always does exactly 1000 points of damage to its target, without the random element found in all other direct-damage spells. 1000 points may sound like a lot, but only if you’ve never played a Final Fantasy. The numbers can get pretty large; at the point I’m at in FF6, my regular melee attacks routinely do more than 1000 points without costing any mana, and it often takes two or three hits to kill something. So in normal circumstances, the 1000 Needles spell is pointless. Its advantage is that it always does 1000 points of damage, regardless of the target’s defense. Monsters with abnormally large defense ratings, and special attacks to overcome it, seem to be a big part of this game.

Regular magic has spells that heal an amount of damage based on the caster’s Magic Power stat, and deals damage on the basis of Magic Power and the target’s Magic Resistance and elemental vulnerabilities. Blue magic has spells that heal damage based on the caster’s current hit points, or deal damage based on how far you’ve walked throughout the game so far. I think my favorite examples of how absurd this can get is the suite of level-based spells. In FF6, this consists of L.3 Muddle, L.4 Flare, and L.5 Doom, and possibly others I haven’t found yet. Muddle, Flare, and Doom are all normal combat spells, respectively causing Confused status, massive non-elemental damage, and a chance of instant death to the target. The number indicates what sorts of creatures are affected: L.3 Muddle casts the Muddle spell on all enemies whose experience level is a multiple of 3, and so forth. This is a blatant intrusion of the stats into the reality of the world. Either the people in the gameworld are aware of the “experience level” mechanic, or they probably find it very confusing how these spells consistently work on some types of monsters and not on others, with no obvious reason. Back in FF5, there was a puzzle element to all this. The variables governing the effects were non-obvious and undocumented, but could be figured out through observation. FF6 uses a lot of the same effects, so the puzzle aspect is gone.

The least abnormal blue spells are the ones that simply do elemental damage on the basis of an element not used in the normal spell tree. From FF1 onward, there’s been a standard sequence of fire, cold, and electrical damage spells, each coming in three levels of severity. Spells doing air-based or water-based damage were outside of this tradition, and assigned to blue. By FF8, they had been folded into the regular spell list. Today’s quirky exception is tomorrow’s normal.

There comes a point where the world breaks. Kefka reaches the sacred place where magic is kept in balance, and unbalances it. Continents split apart. The sea changes color. Long cutscenes play. The heroes’ airship is smashed like a bowl of eggs, and by the time the player is given control again, a year of gametime has passed. It’s clear that nothing will be the same from this point on.

So naturally my reaction is to immediately restore my last save. Not because I have any plans to prevent this apocalypse, which is clearly an inevitable part of the plot, but because it seems like a lot of doors are closing, and I want to do things in the world as it was while I still have the opportunity. On the most immediate scale, there’s an object near the breakpoint that I didn’t manage to pick up. (The ground splits under you if you approach it by the direct route; I had managed to work out how to get to it, but slipped up when I tried, owing to the Sprint Shoes I was wearing making it hard to control my movement.) Glancing at an online walkthrough to see if it was actually worth getting, I learned that I needed to do something slightly differently in the same scene if I ever wanted the ninja to rejoin my party again.

But even beyond the immediate situation, there are goals I want to pursue in the world as a whole. And here’s another of those false-urgency bits: even though the entire pre-cataclysm scene is built with a sense that you’re rushing to intervene before Kefka does something monstrously wrong, you’re given the opportunity at the last moment to go back to your ship and spend a week or two taking care of business.

The first thing I want to do is get Gau up to speed on the latest monsters. Gau has a special training area, the Veldt, where monsters that you’ve encountered in the rest of game show up. The in-game excuse is that they migrate there when you drive them out of the places where they live, which doesn’t make a lot of sense for the imperial soldiers and security robots, but there it is. You can spend a long time in the Veldt waiting for a particular monster to show up, and the designers have sensibly made it a no-XP zone, like the final areas in FF5. And, like those areas, although you aren’t getting normal XP that lets you level up, you do get the secondary version, Ability Points or Magic Points, which, in this game, lets you learn spells from your equipped Magicite crystals. Joining Gau this time is Strago, the Blue Mage, in the hope that he can learn some new spells from creatures that he never had a chance to observe the first time around, due to joining the party too late. Unlike FF5, where the Blue Mage (or someone with the Blue Mage’s “Learning” skill) had to be the target of an attack in order to learn it, it seems that Strago simply has to observe it. For that reason, I’m pairing him up with his granddaughter Relm, who has the ability to draw pictures of monsters that come to life just long enough to make a single attack. When the monster has an attack that Strago can learn, that usually seems to be the one that Relm produces. Thus, she’s kind of like the Trainer in FF5, in that she forms a natural complement to the Blue Mage, and making them relatives is a bit of a hint at that.

(Something to try in my next session: Can Relm draw the heroes? I hadn’t even thought of trying until now. Most attacks and spells can be directed either way, and there are situations where directing them the wrong way — healing the monsters or attacking the heroes — is actually helpful.)

There are other quests that need completing before the world is torn asunder. If there are any Espers still to be found, I should try to find them. (I almost missed the ones from the auction house. I wonder if the auctioneers know what Magicite does, and that they’re effectively holding a slave auction?) There were a couple of significant-seeming locations that I haven’t found the significance of yet, and which may be destroyed in a year. A minor quest involving delivering letters, which has yet to reach any sort of conclusion. The manual mentions a playable Moogle character, Mog, who isn’t part of my party yet, even though I’ve been through a Moogle den. He was playable briefly during that one tunnel defense scene, so I know he’s around, but Moogles are hard to tell apart when you can’t look at their stats. Maybe he’ll join when I talk to him if there’s an open slot in my party or something.

In the classic Wizardry IV, at the end of the initial level, there’s a sign just before the stairs that says “Have you forgotten something?” — a question that would become a repeated motif in the game, and work into the ending. Seeing it there for the first time was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had in a RPG. Once the question has been posed, it’s hard to stop thinking about it. Have I forgotten something? Is there something else I’m supposed to have done by now? What if I can’t go back? The Final Fantasy games aren’t so cruel that they’d lock you out of victory for failing to notice a pickup, and they sometimes provide eleventh-hour second chances to complete collections. Still, I’d like to do what I can now, before I go to meet my appointment with the irrevocable.

Although the worlds in the Final Fantasy series have a lot of elements in common, those elements differ from game to game in their significance to the plot. Take the spells Meteor and Holy. Usually these are just direct-damage spells that the heroes can learn over the course of the game: Meteor is one of the strongest Black spells and Holy is one of the few White spells that kills things. But in FF7, Meteor is a potential extinction-level event and Holy is the only hope for stopping it. This forms the basis of the chief conflict for most of the game. The spells are turned into pure plot events, not part of the game mechanics at all: each is cast only once, in a noninteractive scene.

Similarly, while the bulk of the roster of summonable creatures is repeated from game to game, a particular summonable can be a significant character with its own backstory and cutscenes in one game, and a mere fireball substitute in the next. FF6 takes the former approach a step farther than the other games, though. I’ve mentioned before that one of the basic Final Fantasy plot devices consists of escalating the situation at the end of act 1 by bringing in a new enemy, a threat that dwarfs the previous conflict. The first enemy, for all its power, is ultimately human. The second is the genie that the first lets out of the bottle. The Shinra Corporation gives way to Sephiroth and Jenova, the empire of Galbadia to Ultimecia waiting at the end of time for everything to join her, the empire of Baron to Zemus in his lunar tomb. In FF6, the human enemy is once again an Empire. ¹The Empire doesn’t seem to have a name other than “The Empire” in the version I’m playing. Apparently the GBA port calls it the “Gestahlian Empire”, after its leader, Emperor Gestahl. And the inhuman enemy, the alien threat from without? It’s the summonables. The Espers.

Or so it seems briefly, anyway. The plot is a mass of switchbacks, the player’s sympathy thrown this way and that. First the Empire is the bad guys, secretly keeping a number of Espers captive to drain them of magical power to fuel their Magitek, and ultimately killing them to turn them into “Magicite”. When the remaining free Espers find out, they go on a rampage, destroying most of the Empire as well as countless innocent bystanders. The contrite emperor declares that his war of conquest is over and pleads the heroes for help in making peace with the Espers — Terra, the party’s main mage, is uniquely suited for this, being half-Esper. Then, once you find the Espers and arrange a meeting, it turns out to all be a trick to lure the Espers into the open so Kefka can kill them en masse and sieze the resulting Magicite. Emperor Gestahl shows up personally to declare that this was his plan all along, and that Terra was released from the Empire deliberately in the hope that she’d make contact with the hidden Espers. That turns out to be Kefka magically altering his appearance to taunt you, but then it turns out that he actually is acting on the Emperor’s orders anyway. Somewhere in there, one of the playable characters, a renegade Imperial general named Celes, is accused of being an infiltrator in your party, still secretly loyal to the Empire. I didn’t pay any attention to this calumny at first, but what with all the other betrayals, I’m starting to wonder.

Now, Magicite is the source of magic in this game. Each individual Magicite crystal not only gives its wielder the ability to summon the Esper it came from, it also, over time, teaches you spells. It is in fact the only source of normal spells in the game. Thus, although in theory the death of an Esper is supposed to be a bad thing, you basically wind up hoping it’ll happen more. In that way, it’s kind of like FF5, where the shards of the crystals you were supposed to be protecting yielded new Jobs. The Magicite fragments even look a lot like FF5‘s crystals.

In fact, there’s a lot about the whole situation that reminds me of other games in the series. As in FF5, things become summonable by dying, and it’s even more explicit this time. Like FF4, the summonables have a hidden underground home where they live their lives far from the prying eyes of humans. I mentioned in a previous post how the discovery of an Esper buried in a mine reminded me of FF7‘s Jenova, and that’s an impression greatly strengthened now that I know that the Empire was using captive Espers in secret experiments to create magic-capable soldiers. Equipping a crystal in order to gain spells is a little reminiscent of FF7‘s Materia, but the way I keep shuffling them around between characters, not for the sake of the summon ability but for the ancillary benefits, mainly reminds me of FF8‘s Junction system.

I’ve acquired the airship that inevitably appears in every Final Fantasy. In this installment of the series, the inevitable airship is owned by one Setzer, a notorious gambler and ne’er-do-well with a sideline in abducting attractive young opera singers. Still, the moment he’s mentioned, it’s completely clear that he’s destined to join the good guys. It’s clear because of the way he’s introduced: like all the playable characters, you get a brief scene of him standing against a black background with a few lines of text summarizing his character, and then you get an opportunity to change his name from the default if you like.

I wonder how many players actually take advantage of the renaming option? It seems like it would just create confusion. If I were to change Setzer’s name to something else — Jasque, for example — I’d still have to remember that Jasque is really Setzer whenever I talk about the game with anyone else or read online hints or anything like that. I guess that’s essentially what I ran into when I gave individual names to all my pokémon, but that strikes me as different. Those things didn’t have personalities. Setzer is a distinct character, with an author who isn’t me.

At any rate, Setzer’s in my party now, and has quickly taken over the Han Solo role. This part was previously played by Locke, the party’s thief, but his qualifications are merely that he’s a rogue with a heart of gold, whereas Setzer is a rogue with a heart of gold and his own ship.

But what about the attempted abduction of Maria, the opera singer? Surely kidnapping someone in the middle of a performance is more the sort of thing you’d expect from a deformed sociopath in a mask than from a charming rogue! Well, maybe. At one point before the performance an entity known as Ultros forges a letter from Setzer, hoping to mislead the heroes, so I had some suspicion that he might have also forged the letter announcing Setzer’s attempt to take Maria away (which, when you come right down to it, is a pretty stupid thing to write). But after consulting various wikis, I have to conclude that it’s not so.

Who is this Ultros character? When I first saw him sneaking around the opera house, my only thought was that he was a goofy-looking purple spider. But once I engaged him in battle, and got his full character portrait rather than the squashed-down 16×16 version, he turned out to be a goofy-looking purple octopus. Apparently I already encountered him once, but had completely forgotten about it, even though it had to have occurred less than a week ago. An octopus as a boss monster at the end of a river travel sequence is forgettable; the same octopus sneaking up into the rafters of an opera house and threatening to drop a four-ton weight on the prima donna is somewhat less forgettable.

To fully appreciate the situation, you have to understand that the opera content is played more or less straight, and is actually pretty impressively staged, given the 8-bit theatre. The music is convincingly impassioned and operatic, and even though the arrangement is for videogame console, it conveys enough to let us imagine the orchestra that should be playing it. A synthesized approximation of a singing voice accompanied by lyrics on the screen tell us a story taken from the gameworld’s history, one which I have a sneaking suspicion is going to tie into the main plot at some point. Like the overplot, it’s a story of the injustices of conquest. But even without the octopus around, there’s the matter that it’s all being done by 16×16 super-deformed sprites that emote, to large extent, by jumping around. During the normal course of play, I accept this as just a part of the medium, but here, the whole presentation has changed enough for the strangeness, the incongruity of form and content, to call attention to itself again.

It all reminds me a little of Osamu Tezuka, the renowned “god of manga”. Tezuka’s comics often addressed serious themes, but he never forgot that he was ultimately a professional doodler. His characters were always these softly rounded caricatures, their gestures often ludicrously exaggerated. And whenever he felt things were getting too heavy, he’d throw in some gratuitous visual silliness to break the tension, most often the sudden appearance of a “hyoutan-tsugi”, which is something like a patched-up gourd with a piglike snout. Sometimes he’d suddenly have a multitude of them suddenly rain from the sky and bounce off people’s heads. Tezuka basically created the Japanese animation industry; as such, he’s indirectly responsible for the style of much of today’s imported Japanese culture, including Final Fantasy. Tezuka died when the Final Fantasy series was still in its infancy, so we’ll never know what he would have thought of what it became. But I think he would have approved of Ultros.

Usually, when I play a series of games, I play them in order of release, even if that means suffering through the crummy ones before I get to the ones everyone raves about. Final Fantasy has been an exception, and that provides me a rare opportunity to observe the earlier ones with full knowledge of where things were heading. FF6 is a bridging element in my experience of the series: I’ve already played FF5 and FF7. And it’s interesting to me to see the ways it fits a niche halfway between those two games.

As I’ve commented before, the setting of FF5 seemed to be a medieval veneer over advanced industrial technology. The designers wanted to use submarines and force fields and interplanetary travel, but they still wanted to present it as basically a standard pre-industrial fantasy gameworld with castles and dragons and so forth, so the high tech came off as somewhat incongruous and anachronistic. In FF7, this was reversed: the swords-and-sorcery stuff was the anachronism in a setting that’s basically modern and even futuristic in places. Now, FF6 still has castles and kings, but the idea of technology substituting for magic is central to the premise, so they can’t try to sweep it all under the rug without comment the way FF5 did. On the contrary: whenever there’s technology around, which there frequently is, the characters essentially keep saying “Look! Technology!” One of those kings is a playable character, and also a gadgeteer who’s fitted out his castle with all the latest things, including engines for burrowing into the sand and traveling underground.

The character system also has aspects of both FF5 and FF7. Like the former, you have job skills: only the thief can steal things in combat, only the gadgeteer I just mentioned can use clockpunk contraptions, etc. Like the latter, character class is inextricably bound to individual characters, and each “class” has exactly one character in it. Class doesn’t really mean all that much in FF7, though, since the function of job skills — the main thing the whole Job system was used for — is taken over by Materia. The characters differ only in their base stats, what kinds of equipment they can use, and their “limit breaks”, the special attacks that you only get to use after taking a lot of damage. FF6 seems to have a proto-limit break system. At least, the manual claims that characters can make more powerful attacks when they’re low on health. I haven’t observed this myself, because it’s hard to keep a character low on health long enough for them to make an attack: any enemy group capable of reducing someone to that state is probably also capable of finishing them off unless you provide massive healing at the earliest opportunity. I suppose this is why the designers altered the rules when they made FF7. (“Has taken a lot of damage” is not the same as “is currently low on health”, and is a much easier state to achieve.)

I can’t say much about the plot at this early stage, but so far it’s revolved around an “Esper”, a being of great magic, discovered embedded in a crystal in a mine. The empire wants it, and the player characters don’t want them to have it. After a while, it essentially hatches from its mineral shell and somehow merges with the party’s magic specialist, Terra, who transforms into something other than human and flies away. This could be seen as FF5‘s defend-the-crystals plot combined with the FF7‘s business about Jenova, a powerful alien being discovered underground, whose living cells were injected into humans in a super-soldier project. Or is that too much of a stretch?

Twice now, I’ve encountered a special sort of mini-game in Final Fantasy VI, one where you have to defend a position by moving troops around on a network of tunnels, taking care to keep all possible routes blocked. FF7 had something similar to this, in an optional bit where you could get some special Materia by defending an egg on a mountaintop, but that was more of a pure minigame, with mechanics completely separate from the main game. Whereas in the FF6 version, each confrontation is fought out in the regular combat engine, using the same characters that you’ve been using all along.

Mind you, the first time around, I hadn’t yet accumulated the palette of playable characters I have now, so only one of the three groups I controlled had established characters in it. The rest were filled out with moogles. The second time, I have seven characters and have to divide them into three groups, which makes for a nice bit of tough decision-making. I want each group to be capable of wiping out an attacker in one or two rounds; this requires characters with special skills that let them attack multiple enemies at once, and I only have so many of them. Ideally, I also want a healer in every group, but I only have two mages.

Gau the wild-boy may be the key to that. His special ability is the ability to mimic the attacks of monsters he’s watched you fight. In other words, he’s kind of like the Blue Mage in FF5, but with some key differences, such as that you can only tell Gau what creature to imitate, not which of that creature’s attacks to use. (I understand there’s another Blue Mage-like character to come, and I will probably go into more detail when I encounter him.) At any rate, one time I found a creature that lets Gau cast a resurrection spell. It didn’t do much good, because no one in my party was dead at the time, but it gives me the hope that I might be able to find a creature that lets Gau cast healing spells. He knows a lot of creatures, though, and it’ll take some time to try them all out, so I’ll probably get through the current defense mission before discovering it. I’ll just have to rely on potions.

I think I basically prefer the FF6 version of the defense game to the FF7 one, because of the way it’s integrated into the game, but there’s one thing I find annoying about it: it’s constantly interrupting me. The whole thing is realtime, you see. If I decide that I want to move one of my groups to a particular spot, the enemy keeps advancing while I do it. If they engage a group other than the one I’m currently controlling, I immediately have to fight the new group. By the time that’s done, I’ve lost track of what I was trying to do on the main map; by the time I’ve got it figured out again, I’m plunged into another fight. Maybe it would be better if the main map were turn-based, but that would be contrary to the nature of the game as a whole, with its “active battle” system. I think what I really want is for it to be mouse-based, or in some other manner to allow me to tell a unit to go to a particular destination, rather than having to control it every step of the way with the D-pad. In other words, an RTS interface, because an RTS is essentially what it is.

And it’s about time to break this one out, I think: the last Final Fantasy to play before I catch up to where I came in with FF7. ¹At least, until I get a system capable of playing FF3. The Jobs system from FF5 is gone again, replaced by a plethora of playable characters, each with their own class, and each with a special ability comparable to the Job skills. If there’s ever a point where you can swap characters into and out of the party at will, though, I have yet to reach it. There’s a point I’ve reached where the party splits up into three groups and you can choose which group to follow, but you ultimately have to play through all three scenes, so you’re really only choosing the order to play them in.

The premise as described in the initial cut-scene was kind of intriguing: it sets up a Magic vs Technology scenario, but with magic, not technology, as the threat that throws everything out of balance. There was a vastly destructive mage war, followed by a thousand years without magic, and now a certain General Kefka is rashly trying to reawaken the old powers in order to help his empire take over the world. Unless he has a personal agenda, of course, and is just using his position in the Empire to pursue it. Kefka’s a cackling, hand-wringing sort of villain, and it won’t be surprising at all if he turns out to be a thousand-year-old wizard or something.

The thing that bugs me about this is that the premise is almost completely ignored by the game mechanics. We’re promised a world in which magic is all but unknown, and then immediately find that the imperial army is heavily based around something called “magitek”. As far as I can tell, the only difference between magic and magitek is that magitek doesn’t use mana, which would seem to make it preferable to magic proper. Similarly, a lot of the monsters are capable of producing what third-edition D&D would call “spell-like effects”. I suppose the implication from the backstory is that magic has the potential to be much more powerful than sufficiently-advanced technology. But right now, I’ve got this genuine mage in my party, someone considered valuable enough to the Empire that they’re sending armies to hunt her down, and she’s not all that. Yet.

Another GUI-based RPG by C. Yong, the author of last year’s The Lost Dimension. Spoilers follow the break.
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